David Cameron speech: the Prime Minister's language analysed

Two key themes were prominent in David Cameron's keynote speech at the
Conservative Party conference on Wednesday.

The direction of Mr Cameron's speech was clear from the outset, as he told his audience: "I want to tell you today, in the clearest terms I can, what we must do together. And what we can achieve together."

In his 6,340-word address to his audience in Birmingham he used the word "people" 58 times – the equivalent of once every 110 words, or every eight and a half sentences.

Through references to "people power", "supporting people" and "people like you", the Prime Minister resumed his rhetoric of the general election campaign in which he gave voters an "invitation to join the government of Britain".

The Tory leader laced his speech with the language of his "big society", frequently using words like "together" (20 uses), "society" (19), "spirit" (15) and "fairness" (13) as he sought to portray a hopeful image of the future.

Second on his agenda were terms relating to the economic situation as he sought to blame Labour for the cuts his government has been forced to impose.

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"Services" (18), "money" (18) and "spending" (17) were some of the most commonly used terms, while his speech also contained 12 references to "Labour" compared with just two uses of "Conservative".

These topics were at the expense of some traditionally Conservative themes which barely merited a mention.

"Justice" was mentioned just three times (including two references to "injustice"), while there were two mentions of "defence", three uses of "war" and one solitary occurrence of the word "immigration".

The delivery was similar in length to Ed Miliband's address to the Labour party in Manchester last week, but the leaders adopted different styles to put their messages across.

The Conservative leader attempted to drive his message home by interspersing longer passages of speech with series of short, punchy sentences, often in list format.

Despite being only 190 words longer than his Labour rival's speech, Mr Cameron used 489 sentences – with an average of 13 words in each – compared with Mr Miliband's 378 sentences, averaging 16 words.

In contrast Mr Miliband used slightly longer words in significantly more extended sentences, giving his speech an average reading age (estimated according to the Gunning Fog index) of 11 years old, compared to Mr Cameron's nine.

Both men's speeches were in marked contrast to Gordon Brown's final conference speech as Labour leader last year, in which he used 6,686 words in just 307 sentences - an average of 22 words per sentence.

David Cameron's first speech to Conservative conference as Prime Minister, Birmingham 06/10/10

Number of characters (without spaces): 28,482

Number of words: 6,340

Number of sentences: 489

Average number of characters per word: 4.49

Average number of syllables per word: 1.46

Average number of words per sentence: 12.97

Estimated reading age according to the Gunning Fog index: 9.00

Ed Miliband's first speech to Labour conference as party Leader, Manchester 28/09/10